Former BU fratboy must pay landlords’ six-figure legal bill

Derek Heimlich graduated from Boston University nearly a decade ago, but the legal battle over the damages done to his frat house hasn’t ended.

Heimlich was one of nine BU fraternity brothers who rented three Brookline apartments. When the apartment’s owners didn’t return the tenants’ security deposits, the tenants sued. The apartment owner countersued and settled with all the defendants except for Heimlich and his father who had been his guarantor.

Following a six-day trial, a jury returned a verdict for the landlord for $18,200. But the trial judge found that that Heimlich and his father also had to pay the landlord’s $124,000 legal bill.

The father and son appealed, but the Appeals Court has upheld the attorneys’ fee in an unpublished opinion, saying that “the time spent was appropriate and necessary. The billing records demonstrate hard work in bitterly-fought litigation, caused almost exclusively by defense counsel’s rather bizarre insistence upon a trial.”